Inside the Temple, Nothing Feels Normal
I arrived expecting crowds, rituals and even heightened emotion. But what I was not prepared for was the intensity of it. The first thing that unsettled me was not visual but auditory. There was a constant undercurrent of sound – chanting, yes, but also layered with something else. It was sharp, like irregular cries of people. Not conversations, not prayers in the way we understand them, but bursts of sound that felt scary and involuntary. At first, I tried to place them. Distress? Release? But the longer I stood there, the harder it became to categorise.